As I previously wrote (12), I’m a big fan of Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek approach. Just a few chapters in he mentions what he calls a Dreamline, which is a chart designed to calculate how approachable and within reach your ideal lifestyle is, in terms of finances and time. On the book’s website there were online calculators for filling out the Dreamline, but I didn’t find them to be as helpful as I’d like…so I’ve come up with my own.

I emailed with Tim to get his thoughts on this, mentioning that my company frequently creates attractive and functional reports in Word & Excel, and he figured it’d be worth a try if I could improve on it. As such, all the prose in the spreadsheet I created is directly from his example and used with permission. Anyhow, here it is (with assistance from Keith, SET’s awesome designer) as a Microsoft Excel download:

It was tested on Windows Excel 2002, 2003, & 2007 as well as Mac Excel 2004, and should work fine on all versions of Excel as it doesn’t use any macro code

To begin using it, use the Tab key or the arrows to navigate through the cells. It behaves like an ordinary form

There are two pages of the workbook–a “Dreamline Worksheet” and a “Monthly Expense Calculator.” The total from the Expenses is entered automatically at the bottom of the Dreamline. You can switch between them by clicking “pg 1 of 2″ or “pg 2 of 2″ at the top right of the worksheets:

Both worksheets should print well to 8.5×11 in B&W / Color (the stars may be a bit dark in B&W)

In addition to calculating the total cost of all your items on the Dreamline Worksheet, you can also keep a running total of your highest priority items by “starring” them. Simply choose ‘Y’ in the Star? column to keep a second total:

Please feel free to leave comments and questions below. Thank you, and I hope this proves helpful to you all!

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You can subscribe to this blog to find out when new versions come out and discover other 4-Hour Workweek hacks/lessons-learned. One other thing: I put together a web tool that helps people to spend less time with email. It helps me tune out email distractions so I can check my inbox twice a day, but still get notified of urgent stuff via text message. It’s my other project (called AwayFind), you can check it out here (it’s also free).

I just now uploaded a version with a new password. That password is ‘setconsulting’. Anyone is welcome to play around with this for their own uses so long as they don’t distribute it without permission. Enjoy!

I’ve really enjoyed playing around with your spreadsheet. However, I have noticed 3 things (the first being a genuine error I believe).

1. F38 should equal ‘=(HAVING_TOTAL+BEING_TOTAL+DOING_TOTAL)+(MONTHLY_EXPENSES)’
At the moment it equals =(HAVING_TOTAL+BEING_TOTAL+DOING_TOTAL)+(MONTHLY_EXPENSES*1.3)

However, MONTHLY_EXPENSES (in cell F36) has already been multiplied by 1.3

I think my reasoning on this is right unless there is some reason to multiply this number by 1.3 twice (taxes?)

2. In F39 and F42, it would be more accurate to divide by 30.4 (or even 30.42) since 365 days divided by 12 months comes out to an average month of 30.41666 days. Right now it’s dividing by 30 days which is fine too and gives an extra buffer anyway (and it’s less anal) but just thought I’d mention it. Anyway, people can change this themselves by using the password ‘setconsulting’.

Thanks for the QA work, Hayden. Can I hire you for other projects ;-). I’ve released a version 1.1 that addresses your points 1 and 2 and that is available at the download link above. To further clarify the point, I indicated on the dreamline spreadsheet that a 30% buffer is now included in the monthly expenses total.

As for #3, you’d have to ask Tim whether the 1.3 multiplier is specifically to address taxes, but for an employee that would be a good way to estimate. As an employer or self-employed individual that number ought to be higher, at 40-50%, though it would be more gray if some of the numbers were business expenses.

Love this spreadsheet! Thanks so much for posting it. One note…I would love to be able to date the worksheet somewhere, at the top, so I could refer back to saved versions and know when I had filled it out.
Thanks again!

This is a great resource. I’ve done a little dreamlining and Tim is absolutely right that a lot of the “millionaire” type-experiences I’ve dreamed about don’t take a lot of money. For example, I found I can charter a sailboat in the Caribbean for about $3600 for a month next June. Your spreadsheet makes my planning much easier.

However, there’s something that confuses me. After calculating the costs, shouldn’t the total monthly income be the sum of the costs divided by the number of months that you are setting out the goal? Right now, it’s using the full amount to calculate the TMI, but that doesn’t seem right. If I have a goal to have something worth $120,000 in six months, wouldn’t I need just $20,000 of monthly income to get there (less if it needs to be financed)?

That’s a very insightful point, and I was taken aback by it as I put a lot of thought into this spreadsheet.

All the calculations are identical to the ones Tim uses in his book. However, one of his calculations doesn’t quite fit the rest–that is, in his example, all of his expenses are monthly except for his trip to the Croatian coast which is a total cost, not a monthly one. As such, it really shouldn’t be listed that way. Over the next few days I’m going to think about this and if I’m still in agreement I’ll contact him.

Depending on the outcome of that I may very well revise the spreadsheet to be able to calculate both fixed and monthly prices.

Just to help clarify, I’m in finance, any spreadsheet dealing with numbers should have one unit of measurement (i.e. boxes, each, monthly, daily, etc.) in a single column. So when I completed my form I used monthly only, it gave me the correct figures I needed to write my actions steps, and act.

This is a fantastic blog. I’ve got a new blog that relates to the 4HWW, creating a muse and doing it in a jet set way. I think you’ll dig it. Let me know what you think the URL is www.http://travelhip.tv/robsblog

However I too noticed that some of the things I put down for “want to have” are one-time expenses (e.g. buying a car or computer) vs. monthly expenses (e.g. mortgage, subscriptions, etc.) and that the former wasn’t split off across the six months.

Why not add a new column- maybe on the right side of each row, just as “Star” sits along the left- that’s for “one-time expense?” If we click “yes,” then the formula can divide the total cost by the number in field “In X months I dream of…” to come up with the accurate TMI.

Other than that, am loving it- very exciting to start thinking and planning this way!

I started to do the old dreamline I had saved some time ago, but came up with the same problems (monthly vs one time cost) but was glad to find it was solved long ago :)

Another thing I thought, maybe someone already mentioned it:

Could it be wise to add time as a cost? and if one wants, you could add somewhere what you consider as the cost of your time? :) As Tim shows – oftentimes it is not money we need, but time. So we could calculate a rational time needed to manage with the goals. E.g. I have one of the goals to go to training and other to write a book, these two take a lot of time. So I would like to calculate how much time I need for that and how much time is left for work for example.

Oh, I just realized that the table does not the one-time costs into account, though they are the biggest costs actually. So basically I should divide them into monthly costs to make the calculation? Hm, the calculation is still somewhat strange…

Question: where do your general monthly living expenses go?? I see the spreadsheet automatically calculates the expenses needed to Have, Be and Do, but what about the Get By at the present? A 30% buffer doesn’t cover rent and other necessities, not to mention current debt repayments. I feel like I must be missing something here in how this works.

Thanks for creating this awesome resource. With regards to the dreamline, I’m getting hung up on the “steps” part. In Tim’s example dreamline, when dealing with the trip to Croatia, for the day after tomorrow step he says to reserve the ticket with or without the friend. Am i literally doing the day after tomorrow step the day after tomorrow?! Because i’m not in a position to book a ticket to Europe for the trip that’s on my 6 month list. racking up more debt is not on my list of goals ;) suggestions?
thanks

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